Your software may be powerful and your content marketing plan airtight, but in order to implement your content initiatives, you’ll still have to work with people. Fortunately, we created CrewMachine to simplify project management and people management.

Whether the workforce that executes your content initiatives is composed of a few internal copywriters, several external vendors or a large number of freelancers, CrewMachine makes it easy to coordinate and manage them thanks to a variety of features that make large-scale project management possible.

Ratings

CrewMachine’s rating system enables you to accurately assess how each member of your workforce is performing — no matter how large your workforce is.

As a piece of content passes through a workflow, each user rates the job done by the previous user in the workflow. For example, editors can rate writers on each assignment the writers do, and project managers can rate editors. These ratings are tracked, compiled and presented in an easy-to-read format on the CrewMachine Dashboard (read more about workforce management via the Dashboard below).

Search Tags

Ratings aren’t the only way to track your workforce in CrewMachine. You can assign custom search tags to the profile of each user in the system. This makes it easy to assign work to certain writers, or to find the editors you need to get a project going. Via search tags, you can also record which members of your workforce excel at which kinds of projects, helping you get the right people lined up at the start of any project.

Work History

With one click from a user’s profile, see every assignment they’ve ever worked on, the approval status of each assignment, and their average rating on each project. This enables you to quickly assess your workforce on an individual level.

Dashboard

Track ratings of each user in the system with comprehensive charts and data summaries on the CrewMachine Dashboard. Here, you can see every user’s average rating, and how much time they’re spending on their assignments.

Additionally, for each project you can see where each piece of content is in the workflow. You can assess which aspects of a project are going well, and where the pain points are for your project, at a glance.

Automatic Emails

Communicating with your workforce is essential, but sometimes the amount of communication that’s required for a large-scale project can become overwhelming. CrewMachine is designed to take some of that off your plate.

Our platform is set up so that certain actions trigger automatic emails to the appropriate users. For example, if an editor sends an assignment back to the writer for revision, the platform sends an automatic email to the writer alerting them of this. This takes some of the manual effort out of project management.

Easy, dynamic workforce management is just part of what CrewMachine offers to make content creation simple. Contact us to learn more, and be sure to keep up with our blog!

When it comes to content creation and content marketing, flexibility is key. That’s why we built CrewMachine to accommodate all kinds of projects and all kinds of processes.

Unique Workflow

Naturally, different projects have different development requirements. A short blog post may need to pass through more stages of approval than a product description. An in-depth article, in turn, will require more research than a short blog post.

CrewMachine enables you to set up these workflows — and any other workflows of any complexity — quickly and easily. Decide in what order you want your content to be researched, written, edited, reviewed and optimized for search. Set up and establish that order with a few clicks. Simplify or lengthen the content creation process as you see fit by adding roles to the workflow whenever you want.

Additionally, CrewMachine enables you to be flexible in your approach. You can set workflows at the level of each individual assignment, or update the workflow in bulk for projects as a whole.

Due Dates

CrewMachine does more than merely enabling customized workflows. To keep your projects on schedule and on track, we’ve made it easy to set up due dates for each stage of the workflow.

Plan your projects in advance with due dates for each section of your workforce, whether you’re working with an internal team or external vendors. This way, you’re never behind, and you’re prepared to produce a steady stream of content — a necessity for effective content marketing. You can also be sure projects progress smoothly and on time through each stage of the process.

Workflow management is just one of the many ways CrewMachine is changing and streamlining the content creation process. To learn more, contact us, request a demo or take a look at our blog.

Establish Goals Firmly Goals are important. But establishing unified goals is more important. Unified goals tie in other parts of the organization to work in alignment with Marketing. Everything starts and ends with increased sales or conversions. So a good sales pipeline driven by marketing could be the first and foremost goal. Second could be customer retention or growth. A lot of this activity would be driven by the the account/project management function or delivery organization in case of services. So tying in with their KPIs and what they consider as success would be critical.

Case in Point: Evaluate the most critical need of the organization. Most times it is building the sales pipeline, other times it could be related to restoring the brand, and a few other times it could be focused on growing the existing strategic customer base. As someone leading the marketing pack, you really need to analyze that and establish strong KPIs around them and propose a plan to achieve them.

Think Beyond Marketing

This means that don’t just think about convincing your CMO, but also your CTO and CIO, Sales and Product guys. A lot of these decisions are intertwined and not made in a silo anymore. Marketing budget spend has implications on several groups within the organization especially when it is a start up.

Case in point: you want to make an investment to revamp your web presence on a CMS and give your brand a facelift. A cost-benefit analysis of current vs. ideal state to show it to your CTO would be a good starting point. Identify the key measurable KPIs like development and testing of different builds and templates with an internal development crew vs. running this through a centralized content management system by your marketing team. Establish a concrete ROI either in terms of larger conversions or increased traffic resulting in a possibility of a larger pipeline to impact the topline.

Make Realistic Assumptions to Manage Expectations

We usually get into this ‘transforming the marketing organization’ syndrome. You cannot build this structure in a day. So be conservative but realistic to define what the KPIs should be. Consider all possible failover and contingency scenarios. Establish a fail early, learn fast model with a small budget to prove success before going all in with a marketing strategy. Evaluate your business not in a silo but against and in the face of the different supply and demand, substitutes and complementary forces to assess success and make the bets accordingly.

Case in Point: There might be a chance that you might have a few key marketing resources drop out mid stream, so plan for plan B. Your business could be disrupted by another competitor who builds core strengths really fast to scale. There might a chance that other departments are unable to scale the way you want them to to support your growth trajectory. All of these scenarios need to be built in into your plan.

The Ultimate Trump Card

Believe in the Product – Believe that what you are building is powerful and is going to make a dent in either a big or a small way. That will keep you going even if the above don’t align, and sometimes they don’t. The firm conviction that you are going to make it happen is quite infectious and rubs across other folks within the organization very soon. And that’s when great things happen, including magical approvals to budgets.

Good Luck and Have a Busy 2016!

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